A popular service offered by telecommunications companies is a prepaid or calling card service. Many long distance callers purchase prepaid cards. These cards are ubiquitous in society and are offered for sale at numerous retail establishments.
Prepaid cards, as the name suggests, enable a caller to pay in advance for telephone service. Such cards are used by travelers to avoid high fees for hotel long distance services, for example. Prepaid cards are also given to students by their parents to enable those students to call home without incurring long distance fees. Additionally, prepaid cards are often carried by callers who want mobility, but not the expense of a cellular phone.
Prepaid services, though, are not limited to calling card services. For instance, some local telephone company customers do not wish to allow users of a telephone the ability to make long distance calls, unless the caller pays for such calls. Such a scenario may exist in a business or residential context. In a business context, an employer may desire to tightly control costs, and not pay for non-business calls by employees. In a residential context, a parent may not wish to allow a child to make any long distance calls without first receiving the parent's permission.
Additionally, a telephone customer with either an inadequate income or a poor credit history may not be able to arrange for long distance service without first paying for such service. Such a customer often has long distance dialing blocked from the customer's telephone, and therefore must dial into prepaid service (often using an “800” number) in order to make long distance calls.
A prepaid service subscriber is conventionally required to first dial a prepay service provider telephone number. The subscriber may then be required to enter a PIN to be validated by the prepaid service platform. After being validated, the subscriber may then dial a long distance telephone number for the party that the subscriber wishes to call.
This conventional method of requiring a subscriber to dial two telephone numbers (i.e., one for the prepaid service provider and another for the called party) is cumbersome for a subscriber to a prepaid service. What is needed are methods and systems that overcome the disadvantages of conventional requirements. Such methods and systems should provide additional advantages, including cost effectiveness, flexibility, and ease of implementation.